The Work-Sharing in a Serial Production Line with Consideration of the Balance of Fixed Workload and the Accuracy of Information

Abstract

Abstract-This paper addresses the interaction effect between the workload and the information accuracy in work-sharing environment on the performance of a serial production line. The work-sharing is organized by Dynamic Line Balancing (DLB) policy. Under this policy, the workers can help each other with some tasks, called shared tasks. We investigated two levels of information accuracy that support the decision of working on or passing the shared tasks to the next buffer. We employed different configurations of workload under these two levels of information accuracy. A measure of workload is proposed to ease the comparison. The results of simulation showed a remarkable influence of workload on the performance and found its patterns as work-in-process (WIP) level changes. These patterns are clearly affected by changing the information accuracy level.Index Terms-Work-sharing, information accuracy, dynamic line balancing, fixed workload.